Today TOWER DEFENSE released their third single from the Tanglewood Compound recording sessions. These two new tracks continue a new, more prolific, era for the band.

The lead track, “Friendly Factions,” is a harmony laden, bass blasting, upbeat rocker with a catchy as hell chorus that will surely incite raising a clenched fist in solidarity as you sing along. Oh, and there’s a great new video for it too!

Tower Defense have always written about Nashville, politics and the strife that often exists between the two. For “Friendly Factions,” the lyrical inspiration is as epic as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or P. D. James’ Children of Men. I’m positive the band would not want me citing those two well revered sources as it may color your experience in listening to it but there’s parallels there, no doubt. Bassist and vocalist Mike Shepherd says of the track:

When it came time to write lyrics, all I had was the chorus hook, “Approach the city at night.” So I started thinking about why that admonition would be important, and landed on a narrative about a small group of Nashvillians retreating to Memphis following the fall of the State Capitol. I was imagining a tattered leaflet with instructions for folks to make the trip using backroads, along with information about where resources could be found.

If you’re familiar with TN State politics, a song about the fall of the State Capitol sounds more like terrifying premonition than it does sci-fi. Feeling like a stranger in your own town, seeking like-minded compatriots, plays a part in the brand new video that’s out today as well.

The b-side is “U Got the Look,” a classic face melter by Jeff the Brotherhood, originally from their Heavy Days album. You can’t go wrong with a Jeff the Brotherhood cover.

Pick both songs up over on Bandcamp. We even setup bundles with a new t-shirt featuring the artwork of Ben Johnson. You can also stream them everywhere if that’s something you enjoy!

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Matt Glassmeyer, aka Meadownoise, plays a great deal of live shows. Lately, he’s taken to posting many of them on his YouTube, for which we are grateful.

This rendition of “Cliff House Kids” (from his 2020 release, Threeve) is a different version than the record but as it meanders, expands and contracts across the various players of the Glassmeyer Live Band it finds a new sort of life. I’m not here to describe the magic of live music to you. You know the deal.

If you aren’t already following Glassmeyer on YouTube and Instagram, you may want to do so now so as not to miss out on these explorations.

Oh, and look closely at the crowd and you might just spot another YK Records familiar face.

TLDR: head over here, sign the form and contact your representatives for a chance at introducing a fund that pays musicians more fairly for streaming. The site will help you do both easily.

The United Musicians and Allied Works (UMAW) has partnered with Congressional representatives Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman to introduce the Living Wage of Musicians Act.

You can read the announcement about the act on Tlaib’s website here, on the UMAW’s site here or dive headfirst into the full text of the bill. The helicopter summary of the initiative is this:

The Living Wage for Musicians Act would create a new streaming royalty, with the aim to compensate artists and musicians more fairly at a penny per stream when their music plays on streaming services. Currently, musicians make tiny fractions of a penny per stream, while streaming has grown to represent 84% of recorded music industry revenue in the U.S. Spotify, the world’s largest streaming service, pays rights-holders an average per-stream royalty of $0.003, which means it takes artists more than 800,000 monthly streams to equal a full-time $15/hour job.

Tlaib Introduces Living Wage for Musicians Act

To achieve the above, you can dig into that full text. They propose a “living wage royalty fee” between $4 and $10 to be applied to streaming service providers such as Spotify, Apple and Google which gets paid by the consumer. Those fees are paid out to a third party service that will then distribute them directly to artists based on the streams they had in the last month. The bill provisions for a cap on the payouts per artist per month to ensure that the largest artists aren’t receiving all of the funds.

Overall, a fairly straightforward proposal that would ultimately result in increased prices for streaming services so that artists can get paid. There’s even a payment calculator on the UMAW site to show what kind of funds a specific artist may make once these monies are collected. It’s not necessarily a sustainable amount (i.e. 1,000 streams would be $10) but it’s an astronomical amount more than what is currently being paid.

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There’s plenty of discourse on Reddit and other sites frowning upon this proposal but no one is suggesting any alternatives. DSP’s have been in the critical spotlight for a decade over how little they pay and nothing has changed except they have managed to pay artists less.

Devaluing music is a growing problem and paying artists fairly is a difficult and complicated topic. There’s never going to be a perfect solution but having some solution sounds fantastic.

Please consider showing your support for this proposal by adding your name to the form on the UMAW site and contacting your US Representatives – two actions that the website makes extremely easy to do.

Two bits of excellent news today. First and foremost, The Robe has released two more brand new tracks – “I Could Stay” / “The Last Dancer.” Much like the previous releases – “Destroyer” / “The Handbook” and “It’s So Easy” / “Never Tear Me Apart” – there is no background story or about this song tale to tell you. It’s not that the songs don’t have meaning, it’s that it’s up to you to apply the meaning yourself. Simply give them a listen to discover it.

Long story short, in just three months we’ve been bestowed six new songs from The Robe. What did we do to deserve these treats? Ours is not to question why, ours is just to fully enjoy.

It’s available on Bandcamp and streaming everywhere.

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The second dose of good news is that The Robe will be playing at The Blue Room here in Nashville on Friday, March 15th. The High Vibrations lineup put together by Leanne Merritt of Xposure is most excellent.

Tickets are available here. See you there.

A press release generally contains a little snippet of background information about a song. Maybe it’s an anecdote about what inspired the lyrics, or a tale about why certain changes or instrumentation were chosen. These stories act as an enticement to the reader to click through and listen to the music being offered up – providing context for what lies on the other side. You still can’t embed music or video directly into an email (thankfully), so a press release is meant to lure you in. It can work very well! 

However, providing a background story or context to any creative endeavor will, inevitably, tint the lens through which the listener receives it. What do you do when ambiguity is the intention? 

Explaining lyrics, giving stories from the studio or laying out inspiration for a song can be fascinating indulgences but giving listeners the opportunity to form their own opinions can be an even better experience. Tho, a more difficult one to explain. 

I won’t tell you what these two new songs from The Robe mean because I don’t know. I could tell you what inspired the album art but I won’t because you can draw your own conclusions. I won’t break down the lyrics to either song (tho I have pored over both of them) because I don’t know what inspired them. 

What I can tell you is that The Robe continues to evolve their sound in a way that checks a lot of boxes for me. As someone on this mailing list, maybe that’s enough enticement to continue on this journey.

See you on the other side. Bandcamp / Streaming

Duct Tape and Dreams is a short film about the revival of the SFMOMA’s soapbox derby. Here’s a piece of the official excerpt:

After more than two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was time to bring art outside the museum’s walls. On April 10, 2022, SFMOMA revived the legendary artists’ soapbox derby — first organized by the museum in 1975 — and thousands of people lined the curving hill of McLaren Park’s Shelley Drive to watch the action unfold. Selected by invitation and an open call, more than 250 artists and fabricators collaborated on art-on-wheels to compete for thirty artist-designed trophies. The cars took numerous forms, including recognizable food items, animals, everyday objects, and tributes to our local landscape. All of them capture the spirit of radical joy that this event brought to our creative community and to the people of the San Francisco Bay Area.

It’s a delightful tale that follows a number of artists as they create and race their soapbox derby vehicles. It’s honestly not even that important that it’s in San Francisco or put on the SFMOMA, it’s just a very joyous expression of creativity and fun – a much needed reprieve in 2022.

How does this relate to yk Records? Well, the majority of the score is set to Uncle Skeleton tracks that you may know and love.

How did this come to pass? Well, directors Ian Watt and RJ Kosineski found Uncle Skeleton on the licensing service Musicbed and felt it was a great fit. According to this quote, they really liked it!

“Uncle Skeleton’s incredible sonic landscape perfectly captured the quirky and passionate display of community, art, and pure joy of the Soapbox Derby. In a way, it telegraphed the still-present thriving underground scene in an otherwise tech-overthrown San Francisco—weird, yet beautiful!”

– Director Ian Watt
Musicbed Awards, Spring Summer Selections

This isn’t an ad for Musicbed but we certainly appreciate when opportunities like this one come to pass that most definitely would not have otherwise. It is a great fit between music and story and hopefully you’ll give it a watch.

Once you’re done watching, here’s a playlist of Uncle Skeleton songs that were cited as used in the film. Enjoy them anytime!

Recently, The Robe (aka Rollum Haas) guest hosted the WXNA radio show “Whistle In” (hosted by New Man‘s own Cody Newman). Over the course of an hour, Rollum shared a wide variety of songs worth hearing. You know, like what you’d want to hear on the radio?

The broadcast is archived here, enjoy at your leisure!

Tracks:

Lio – “Sage comme une image”
Takeo Watanabe – “Countdown”
Yushi Matsuyama – “Sassotaru Char”
Duran Duran – “Friends of Mine”
Prince & The Revolution – “I Wonder U”
Henry Badowski – “My Face”
New Musik – “This World of Water”
A.R. Kane – “Miles Apart”
The Lotus Eaters – “Out On Your Own”
Robert Görl – “Mit Dir (Extended)”
Erik Satie, Pascal Rogé – “Sports et divertissements”
The Robe – “It’s So Easy”
Nubuo Uematsu – “Dear to the Heart”
Franco Battiato – “Summer on a solitary beach”
Pet Shop Boys – “Liberation”

Uncle Skeleton released his sixth full-length album, Golden Hour, back in December of 2021. There was always an intention of putting together an album visualizer that embraced slow sunset footage, as an augmentation to the themes of the record itself. Life got in the way and the visualizer was never complete… until now.

The original intent was to set the entire record to one sunset but when push came to shove, multiple sunsets was just more pleasing. Get this video up on your big screen and immerse yourself. It’s slow moving but that’s intentional to give you some proper headspace for reflection on whatever topic intrigues you.

The record is available on Bandcamp and streaming everywhere as well.

It’s been five years since the release of Patrick Damphier’s debut solo album, Say I’m Pretty. To celebrate, Patrick put together a playlist of songs from the record sprinkled together with songs by artists that he personally adores.

Listen to the Odd Man Out playlist on Spotify. If you would like it on a different streaming service, drop a comment.

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Back in 2019 when the record was originally released, there were a number of videos that went along with the record that are, absolutely, worth revisiting now.

All of these videos were shot by Joshua Shoemaker. The live performances both feature an all-star band behind Patrick, including Rollum Haas, Rodrigo Avendano, Charlie Shea, Todd Bolden and Molly Parden & Jessie Baylin where noted.

If you’ve not spent any time with Say I’m Pretty, there’s no better time than now. It’s available on Bandcamp and streaming everywhere else. Once you’ve fallen in love with that, you can also spend some time with the Say I’m Pretty Remixes. Treats all around you.

The last few days I’ve been driving across the country from Nashville to Los Angeles. During one of the particularly long hauls through the night I put on these two brand new tracks from The Robe, aka Rollum Haas. The air was intensely foggy; intensifying every road sign and neon light that passed. “It’s So Easy” unfurled its atmospheric tones and deep bass before snapping into the absolutely transfixing dance beat, guitar flourishes and mesmerizing vocal lines. “Never Tear Me Apart” relaxed the tempo with its spacey expanses and plea for sleep. Suffice to say, it was the perfect soundtrack for the occasion and required repeat listens. 

While these songs work remarkably well for a road trip, they also hit the same spot on the dance floor, in your headphones or around the house. The Robe’s sound continues to evolve, adding layers of instrumentation and detail that reward an attentive listen. 

These are pop songs that infuse life from compositions that only The Robe could bring to life. I can’t wait for you to hear them.. over and over.

Get them on Bandcamp. Stream them anywhere. Save and share.